There is one part of that sentence Annisa feels competent to interact with. "Sparring knives are really good. It's actually kind of hard, to train the impulse to use a knife effectively against a person - mals are easier - and it's differently hard to train ways of killing things without them killing you back, and it builds mana.

Why don't we do other homework and then we can come back to the - French syntax thing."

"I really wanna do the History of Artificing homework, because I can read the Middle Egyptian text, and I bet I can leverage this to get us all an A right out the gate. If we're looking for places to start."

"Yeah, all right, let's do that."

"Oooh, I like that plan. How do you want to divide it up?"

Annisa is still behaving uncharacteristically stupidly. Enough so that Malak is starting to worry it might not actually be uncharacteristic. She likes Annisa and wants to keep working with her, but if she gets spellchoked because she keeps turning down people offering to help her French for cheap, Malak is going to have to cut her loose.

"Yeah, that sounds like a good thing to do first."

Annisa has resigned herself to needing to trade for French help until she's spell-competent, but she wants to spend a pleasant hour doing enjoyable homework on some other subject first; she doesn't think she's just pointlessly procrastinating on the French, she suspects working together on other homework will be useful for establishing a group dynamic that can then carry over. 

"Maybe Naima can read out the descriptions of the battle and we can all list of possible ways off generating those effects, and then split the work of tracking down where those effects are attested in the textbook, and then if we want some extra buffer in case the homework gets harder later we can look through some other books for corroboration, famous battles usually have several different historians writing about them."

"Sounds good to me." Definitely better than her idea, which was going to be just doing the whole assignment, which left her stuck on what the others could trade her for it.

"I think multiple accounts is a more modern thing, the really ancient stuff usually just gets one official account by the royal scribe or whatever. And if there are others they probably didn't survive to get translated. And they might be in Sumerian." Malak has been WARNED about this. This is how Azat got stuck with Sumerian.

She is kind of tempted to say that that's cool, it just means she'll learn Sumerian the next time the school insists on sticking her with a language lab, but that sounds maybe insensitive.

"Oh, Sumerian, I've been wanting to pick up Sumerian," says Annisa dryly. "Well, read it out, Naima, and we can think about opportunities for extra credit once we've gotten the basic assignment out of the way."

Naima can read the English translation, offering alternative translations for any parts that strike her as ambiguous or where the full meaning maybe isn't coming across in the textbook one.

"Okay, where it says the division of Ptah brought down the narrow passes upon the Hutti – well, it's most likely to be incantation but anything is this early, how else could you do it, you could make something that generates vibrations in rocks, something that causes earthquakes – or it could be figurative, it could mean something like heavy rain – " 

It's the contrast that got Annisa, she thinks. All of her other classes are such fun. "Who picked that pass to have the battle at, if they had advance notice you could do it with artifice by burying some rods in the ground that transmute their surroundings when it's triggered - they had rods back then, right -"

"That's clever – Naima, does it say?" 

"Uh - here. It sounds like the Hittites arrived first, and the Egyptians came up pretty close without realizing that the Hittite forces were there, and ended up being surprised. There's more detail than that if you want it, though, it sounds like a kind of complicated situation with truthful spies and lying spies and some double agent spies."

"Oh – maybe the Hittite wizards had some kind of obfuscatory charms. Does limit the options for what the Egyptians could have been doing, though, if they didn't prepare the site – "  

"To be clear, the Egyptians did make camp and get surprised while at camp? I don't know what sorts of things you'd do when making camp as a matter of course, though, presumably not the same things you'd do when preparing for battle."

"We could separate out artifice the Egyptians might've had for defending a camp though that's really something where I'd expect mostly incantations."

She flips a page. "....okay, this says that the Egyptians failed to capture Kadesh, which I think is the nearby city, which suggests that the Egyptians did select the site in that they were deliberately attacking it, they just hadn't expected it to be defended. - I promise I'm very practiced at reading this language and am merely not practiced at reading accounts of military strategy."

"Another thought: chariots. Both sides are using chariots, and the Hittites are crossing a river with them that is later said to be deep enough that a bunch of the people trying to swim across it unaided just drown. Do we think that the chariots are magical, because that seems like it would obviously be artifice."

"I don't know – they're probably wooden, and wood floats, right? But magic would definitely help. We should also be thinking about the obvious stuff – enchanted spears, enchanted bows – they have bows, I think? They must have, if they have chariots. I miss the internet so much." 

"The chariots seem like a good candidate - I wouldn't count out the camp defenses, though, I think some of the Roman legions used self-assembling camps..."

"Shield-holders, obviously, that's some of the earliest artifice. Amplified horns and drums."

"Can't you use chariots with spears? - I am not at all an expert in what kinds of combat maneuvers you can do with a chariot."

Her mind conjures up the image of someone gliding through the graduation hall on some kind of magical chariot, but presumably there are many, many reasons why no one does this.

"The artillery would be artifice, if they meant to sack a city - does it say anything about the city's walls -"

"Not in this excerpt, I don't think the Egyptians ever got close enough to the city to use whatever they'd brought for that. That sounds like the sort of thing there might be an account of elsewhere, though, if we did want to look for one."